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Lamott, Anne. Operating Instructions.
This is a collection of journal entries by writer Anne Lamott documenting the first year of her son's life. Annotation Lamott, Anne. Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Print. Quotes and Notes ...from "Some Thoughts on Being Pregnant: A Preface of Sorts" “For instance, it occurs to me over and over that I am much too self-centered, cynical, eccentric, and edgy to raise a baby, especially alone.” (4) “What are you, some kind of nut? I ask myself, and I know the answer is yes, some kind of nut, and maybe one who is not well enough to be a mother. But this is not the worst fear.” (5) “I pretended to be able to distinguish each section of the baby because I didn’t want the doctor to think I was a lousy mother who was already judging the kid for not being photogenically distinct enough.” (5-6) Fear and “knowledge” of baby’s abnormality Also fear of trying everything and still having someone take the baby away because of her maternal “incompetence” “…that I won’t be able to make enough money and will have to live in a tenement house where the rats will bite our heads while we sleep, or that I will lose my arms in some tragic accident and will have to go to court and diaper my son using only my mouth and feet and the judge won’t think I’ve done a good enough job and will put Sam in a foster home…” (9-10) “As I said, though, it didn’t feel very good, and it brought me up against that horrible, hateful truth—that there wasn’t anything outside myself that could heal or fill me and that everything I had been running from and searching for all my life was within.” (12-13) This quote is interesting in that Sam, who she sees as a kind of salvation and cure, is literally, physically, “within” her. Just a thought. “So I am often awake these days in the hours before the dawn, full of joy, full of fear.” (14) Ambiguous feelings about the approaching birth of the baby. ...from September 1989 “The doctor looked at the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor and said dully, ‘The baby’s flat,’ and I instantly assumed it meant he was dead or at least retarded from lack of oxygen. I don’t think a woman doctor would ever say anything like that to a mother.” (16-17) I’m not sure how much this ties to gender and gendered parenting roles but myself, as a female reader, immediately panicked, felt a physical pain in my gut, got teary eyed, and my mouth fell open. I was scared to keep reading. “I was in despair. I made a tiny little poo on the table, which they didn’t mention at the time but which they now manage to work into about two-thirds of all our conversations. I believe that when the last nail is being hammered into my coffin, they will both be peering in, saying, ‘Oh, remember when she made that little tiny poo on the table when she was having Sam?’ And then I got really sick. I got an infection from where Sam’s fist tore a little hole in my vagina. (He came out with his fist balled up by the side of his head. I’m reasonably sure he was trying to do the black-power salute.)” (18) The baby causes her humiliation, pain, and a threatening illness even before he has exited her birth canal. She claims the “tiny little poo” though she knows it may haunt her for the rest of her life (and into death). She tries to remove Sam as the one responsible for her sickness. It’s “Sam’s fist” and the hole he makes is “little.” Though she jokes it off in this passage, it is clear that in the first few months of Sam’s life the vaginal tearing is really painful for Anne and difficult to bear. She can hardly walk, which she often has to do to calm the colicky, crying baby, she has to sit on a special pillow, and she feels as though her entire body has been destroyed by the birthing process. Her frustration and anger about him/his behaviors become more pronounced and direct later. She blames him for a lot and gives him “motives” which he is clearly way too young to have. “I felt like my heart was going to break from all the mixed-up feelings and because I couldn’t even really take care of my baby.” (19) The baby hurt her, made her very sick, and she still feels guilty for not being able to care for him through her fever and pain “I’ve decided the reason Sam’s so gorgeous is that God knew I wouldn’t have been able to fall in love with this shitting and colicky little bundles if he looked like one of those E.T./Don Rickles babies.” (20) “Maybe mothers who have husbands or boyfriends do not get so savagely exhausted, but I doubt it. They probably end up with these eccentric babies plus Big Foot skulking around the house pissed off because the mom is too tired to balance his checkbook or give him a nice blow job…This is strictly sour grapes. I wish I had a husband. I hope God sends him one someday. It is a huge thing not to have.” (20) “Anyway, after I introduced Sam to them and sat down on my doughnut seat in the front row with Peg, I really got into the service. The baby was asleep in my arms, and I stood for the first hymn feeling very adult—an actual mother, for God’s sake—only to discover that the doughnut seat was stuck to my bottom, and milk was absolutely pouring out of my breasts. I was not yet secure enough to hold the baby with one hand, so I was cradling him in my arms and couldn’t free up either hand to pull the doughnut seat off. So I just stood there bent slightly forward, warbling away, with my butt jutting out and ringed by the plastic doughnut.” (28) Mothering is not graceful or pretty “I was just hating Sam there for a while. I’m so goddamn fucking tired, so burnt beyond recognition that I didn’t know how I was going to get through to the morning. The baby was really colicky, kvetching, farting, weeping, and I couldn’t get him back to sleep. Then the kitty starts in, choking like mad and barfing for a while and continuing to make retching sounds for a while longer, but curiously enough I all seemed to soothe Sam, who fell back to sleep.” (32) Cat as a kind of second child; she describes its curiosity, jealousy, and badly times interactions with the baby “He’s so fine all day, so alert and beautiful and good, and then the colic kicks in. I’m okay for the first hour, more or less, not happy about things but basically okay, and then I start to lose it as the colic continues. I end up incredibly frustrated and sad and angry. I have had some terrible visions lately, like of holding him by the ankle and whacking him against the wall, the way you ‘cure’ an octopus on the dock. I have gone so far as to ask him if he wants me to go get the stick with the nails, which is what my friend Kerry says to her dogs when they are especially bad. I have never hurt him and don’t believe I will, but I have had to leave the room he was in, go somewhere else, and just breathe for a while, or cry, clenching and unclenching my fists. I have four friends who had babies right around the time I did, all very eccentric and powerful women, and I do not believe that any of them are having these awful thoughts. Of course, I know they’re not all being Donna Reed either, but one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one’s secret insanity and brokenness and rage. Someone without children, who thinks of me as being deeply spiritual, said the other day that motherhood gave me the opportunity to dance with my feelings of inadequacy and anger, and my automatic response was to think, Oh, go fuck yourself, you New-Age Cosmica Rama dingdong head—go dance with that one…I have always known, or at least believed, that way down deep, way past being kind and religious and trying to take care of everyone, I was seething. Now it’s close to the surface. I feel it race from my center up into my arms and down into my hands, and it scares the shit out of me.” (36-37) Child exposes mother's own personal vulnerabilities and feelings of inadequacy Projection of anger onto child, other adults, other parents Mixture of emotions in response to Sam’s behaviors (sadness because she can’t fix him, anger at herself and Sam because of his endless crying, etc.) Fear of self around baby in the midst of angry/hateful emotions. Scaring oneself and then removing oneself from that environment as a coping technique --> Carol Tyler does this by running outside in “The Outrage” Comparison of self to friends/other moms who are doing “better” and so are better (as mothers, as humans, as women --> clearly displayed in the “very eccentric and powerful women” comparison). Feel she is not doing as well as other mothers because she feels anger and resentment “good moms” are not supposed, and “don’t,” feel. Grabbing by the ankles and smacking against the wall is the same motion Sethe made with Denver in Beloved “For two weeks I vacillated between thinking I had no choice but to have the abortion, and thinking maybe there was a way for me to pull this whole thing off and that maybe God had something up his sleeve and I was going to come into some money or something. And two weeks after I found out I was pregnant, I went to bed with so much pain in my chest that I lay there breathing like a three-hundred-pound asthmatic, just lost in the ozone, wheezing, blinking back tears. Early that morning I dreamed that I was walking along the dock of the houseboat where I used to live, carrying my little baby boy, and I tripped, and he ended up falling into the bay, and I dove in but knew I had lost him. I kept swimming downward and downward, and I kept managing to just ouch his body as it fell through the really freezing black water. Then I couldn’t see him at all. Through a small miracle I felt my fingers on his body again, and I actually dug them into his flesh, like the psychic surgeons supposedly do, and my fingers went all the way into him, like he was the Pillsbury Doughboy, and I got hold of him and swam to the surface. When I broke through, holding him above my head like the Olympic flame, there were friends waiting there who rushed him to the hospital, and I knew he was okay.” (40) I wrote a story like this (with some very uncanny similarities) a few years back as I started to think about really having a kid(s) She makes continual alien references about herself (“E.T. with an afro” 38) and Sam (“They’re not quite human…eyes are like those of a gentle extraterrestrial” 47) “The colic was very bad last night. Actually, it is bad almost every night now. Everyone is supportive and encouraging, but the colic still makes me feel like a shitty mother, not to mention impotent and lost and nuts. I can handle the crying for a long time, but then I feel like I’m going to fall over the precipice into total psychosis. Last night at midnight it occurred to me to leave him outside for the night, and if he survived, to bring him inside in the morning. Sort of an experiment in natural selection.” (48) Scary kind of threat following feelings of inadequacy and of being a “shitty mother” ...from October 1989 “After I nursed the baby a while ago and we had gone back to sleep on the futon on the living room floor, which is still our headquarters, I heard him begin to whimper, and I thought, ‘Go back to sleep, you little shit.’ He kept whimpering, like a golden retriever whose feelings you’ve hurt, but he wasn’t really crying, so I didn’t wake up all the way. I kept shushing him and thinking, ‘You whiny little bugger.’ Finally, at least ten minutes later, with total hostility and resentment, I roused myself enough to reach over and to rub his back, which sometimes helps him a little—and he wasn’t there! I actually thought he’d been kidnapped; or left. It turns out he had somehow scooted off the bed and landed on the floor between the head of the futon and the wall and had just lain there whimpering. I don’t think I can capture in words how I felt at that moment.” (55) Hostility towards baby but still overcome with concern when she can’t find him Note the thought/fear that she has that Sam, even as a completely dependent and essentially immobile infant, would leave her. She puts emphasis, through the use of italics, on this possibility. “I’ve had the secret fear of all mothers that my milk is not good enough, that it is nothing more than sock water, water that socks have been soaking in, but Sam seems to be thriving even though he’s a pretty skinny little guy…I’m going to have an awards banquet for my body when all of this is over.” (59) “I wonder if it is normal for a mother to adore her baby so desperately and at the same time to think about choking him or throwing him down the stairs. It’s incredible to be this fucking tired and yet to have to go through the several hours of colic every night. It would be awful enough to deal with if you were feeling healthy and upbeat. It’s a bit much when you’re feeling like total dog shit. When he woke me up at 4:00 this morning to nurse, I felt like I was dying. I felt like getting up to pull down the shades and wave good-bye to all my people, but I was too tired.” (59) “In a very real sense, I felt that life could pretty much just hit me with her best shot, and if I lived, great, and if I died, well, then I could be with Dad and Jesus and not have to endure my erratic skin or George Bush any longer. But now I am fucked unto the Lord. Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I just didn’t used to care all that much.” (60-61) Note the “at the same time” comment. Simultaneous and conflicted thoughts and emotions; pretty much the definition of maternal ambivalence. “I sit there in the kitchen miserably pumping away, feeling like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, pumping out a bottle of milk for the little infant Antichrist.” (62) “I totally understand child abuse now. I really do. He was really sobbing and the gas pain was obviously unbearable, and I felt helpless and in a rage and so tired and fucked up that I felt I should be in a home.” (64) “Plus I no longer ever have any free hands. If I were going to write, I’d have to sit at my desk like Christie Nolan, with a unicorn stick on my forehead, my mother behind me pushing my head toward the keyboard so I could band out letters with the stick. But she’d secretly be wanting to play with the baby instead, and she’d stand there feeling all bitter and resentful that my Aunt Pat was getting to hold him more than she was, and then she’d end up being really rough with my head, banging out the letters too hard, like she was hammering a stake into the ground.” (67-68) Interesting placement of anger in her own mother as she reverts to a dependent child-like state in this fantasy. The mother is “bitter and resentful” because she cannot have her needs and desires filled as she tends to her needy child “At midnight I broke under the strain and called this organization called Pregnancy to Parenthood. They help stressed-out parents and have a twenty-four-hour switchboards that I think is to prevent child abuse. I felt humiliated calling and was crying quite hard, and Sam was crying quite hard, and I told the person on the line that I didn’t think I was going to hurt him but that I didn’t think I could get through the night.” (71) Suicide to remove one’s self (which they see as bad, poisonous, or hurtful in itself) from the child’s presence and stop harming the child. At least one of the case studies from Almond used this specific thought process. “I had completely forgotten that today is my publication date, that I actually have a book coming out of the chute right now…I really can’t relate, though. I keep thinking, Well, that’s nice. I’m pleased and it’s a huge shot in the arm—still, I keep thinking that the jig is just about up. The phone will ring and the authorities will at first gently try to get me to confess that I didn’t actually write the book, and if I continue to claim that I did, they’ll turn vicious, abusive: ‘Look at yourself! You’re a goddamn mess. You’ve got a functioning IQ of less than 100, your nerves are shot, your hands tremble, you’re covered with milk and spit-up. You have trouble writing out checks, yet you want us to believe you produced a novel? Well. We don’t think so.’” (71-72) Cannot imagine her professional, writer life and her life as a mother as belonging to the same person, simultaneously “I know Sam will grow up and have all these terrible secret thoughts, too. His self-centered, petty, envious, conniving mule-stupid side will haunt him; he will be plagued by terrible self-doubts and fear. I hope I can remember to tell him then that on the night of the 1989 earthquake, I was trying to figure out how distributors would be able to get copies of my book into the stores, what with the Bay Bridge down and all. I guess he’ll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light—that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to figure other stuff out first, like how to keep his neck from flopping all over the place and how to sit up.” (77) “I couldn’t suck out the mucus with the rubber-bulb aspirator like normal functioning mothers are supposed to be able to do, and he was obviously quite uncomfortable even though I had a humidifier going.” (78) A comparison to the mysterious “normal mother” appears. What standard is this? Where did it come from for Anne? “I kept trying to convey to Orville how wasted I am by the baby’s needs, while the whole time Sam lay there doing his baby Jesus routine.” (79) Tries to tell others (Orville, the pediatrician, etc.) of Sam’s wildness/badness but he always behaves well with and in front of others This phenomenon is listed as one of Winnicott’s “reasons for temporary hatred” in Almond’s book She feels frustration at Sam for making her look like a liar, ashamed because she is “tattling” on him but can’t just take the crying and general baby-ness ...from November 1989 “Sam cried a lot last night. I kept remembering my friend Michelle, who would go out in the field by her house and sit in a rocking chair while Dennis took care of their first baby, Katherine, who cried all the time. Michelle just sat out there in the field for hours, rocking miserably by herself, saying over and over, ‘This is not a good baby.’” (102) “I’ve never been so up and down in my life, so erratic and wild. My body is slowly getting back to normal, except for my butt and thighs. I have to keep remembering the line about the little earth suits and that I am a feminist, because the thighs are just not doing all that well. I lay in the bathtub yesterday looking at them, thinking of entering that annual Hemingway write-alike contest with a piece called, ‘Thighs Like White Elephants.’” (105) How does a feminist deal with having a kid? With the body changes that inevitably happen with that? ...from December 1989 “It has been a terrible day. I’m afraid I’m going to have to let him go. He’s an awful baby. I hate him. He’s scum…I’m not even remotely well enough to be a mother. That’s what the problem is. Also, I don’t think I like babies.” (114) Moves the problem from being within Sam to being within herself (her not being well, her not liking babies) Anger and frustration towards the baby become less prominent (almost non-existent) once Sam starts sleeping through the night References to how tired she is are still consistently present Some sad reflection on Sam not having a father but she is quick to refer to the “tribe” he has instead (her family, friends, reading group, church group, etc.) ...from January 1990 “Things are getting better now. They’ve been easier for a month. People kept telling me that I just had to hold on until the end of the third month and everything would get easier. I always thought they were patronizing me or trying to keep me from scrounging up cab I fare to the bridge. But I remember a month ago, when he turned three months and one or two days—it was like the baby looked at his little watch calendar and said with a bit of surprise, ‘Oh, for Chrissakes, it’s been three months already—time to chill out a little.’ He sleeps every night, and he doesn’t cry or gritch very often, and just in general seems to be enjoying his stay a little bit more. It’s much better. I’m much better. This guy I know who is really nuts and really spiritual said the other day, ‘My mind is a bad neighborhood that I try not to go into alone.’ That pretty much says it for me in the first three months…My friend Michelle calls the first three months the fourth trimester.” (134) As Almond mentioned, developmental growth can greatly help mothers who struggle in specific periods of the child’s life to remain in control and not totally depressed. This entry is from January 4, 1990. “I’m mental and defeated and fat and loathsome and I am crazily, brain-wastedly tired. I couldn’t sleep. This is maybe the loneliest I have ever felt. It’s lonelier than Dad’s last few months, when his brain was all gone. At least he used to sleep through the night.” (136) This entry is from January 9, 1990. Just four days later and her mood has greatly shifted. “Right now, I feel very aware of all the volunteers God’s given to me, because I tell you, I’ve ended up on my butt in the dirt a lot these last few months. I ended up there again this morning. Now I’m back on my feet, more or less” (137) Later entry from the same day showing yet another shift in attitude. Self medication through God, reminders of one’s network/friends, and how it isn’t as bad as it was before. “Last night we were driving to the grocery store, and he was falling asleep in his car seat. When we got to the parking lot of the store, I said his name loudly to wake him up. He was halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and suddenly his eyes rolled all the way back in his head, and he shuddered, and I decided in a split second that he was having a massive seizure. I couldn’t breathe, and when, two seconds later, he wouldn’t rouse, I slapped his face! And he startled awake and look at me like my nasal hairs were on fire. He burst into tears. I took him out of his seat and comforted him, and then we went into the store…Back at home, he fell right to sleep. I was starving to death and felt like my body was cannibalizing itself, and I desperately wanted to cook while he slept.. but I kept dropping things—a mug, a huge slotted metal spoon—right next to his bassinet. Each time he’d startle and almost wake up, while I’d stand there holding my breath, and then I’d try to move more careful. I felt like I was underwater. I was trying to do everything while wearing oven mitts on both hands. Then I actually dropped a pan on the floor, and it reverberated like a huge gong you might use to summon the Dalai Lama to dinner, and I just turned on myself viciously and said, ‘Why don’t you just fucking slap him again?’ I ended up so mad at myself, so impatient, and that sent me into this terrible feeling of aloneness. Sam kept sleeping.” (140-141) Guilt and self-hate over this physically violent/aggressive moment even though it was done out of fear and a wish to ascertain that Sam was okay “It’s great to have so many friends who had babies right around the time I did—even if it did make me bitter and resentful that they also got to have husbands and nurseries—because they all have extremely bad attitudes and sick senses of humor like me. It would be intolerable to call a friend, a new mother, when you were really feeling down and for her to say some weird aggressive shit like ‘Little Phil slept through the night yesterday, isn’t that marvelous since he’s only eight weeks old, and guess what, I’m already fitting back into my prepregnancy clothes.’ You’d really have no choice but to hope for disaster to rain down on such a person.” (148-149) ...from February 1990 “We are having a hard morning. I didn’t sleep much last night; I woke up at 3:00 feeling discombobulated and afraid. I wish I had an armed husband or at least a dog. Everything would feel safer. I’m tired and wired and fat and feeling about as feminine and spiritual as the late great Divine. I am also totally bored. The kitty has been crying the blues all morning, and it is wearing badly on my nerves. I think I’ll have her put to sleep this afternoon. Maybe that would cheer me up. At least it would be something to do.” (157) Security is masculinized (armed husband or dog which is generally a “man’s” pet) Fatness as antonymous with femininity Killing beloved cat as better than the monotony of child rearing (violence and grief > boredom) “Maybe it also helps that there is no angry dad stomping around. But that always hurts so much to think about, because it would also be great to have a kind and funny dad here with us, hanging out, maybe even helping a little.” (159) “I was a mess all morning. Maybe my hormones are raging, maybe that’s what the craziness was all about. Something is really off. Part of me wants my body back, wants to stop being a moo-cow, and part of me thinks about nursing him through kindergarten. I know a woman who nursed her daughter until the girl was almost four, and of course we all went around thinking that it was a bit much, too Last Emperor for our blood. But now when Sam and I are nursing, it crosses my mind that I will never ever be willing to give this up. It’ll be okay, I think to myself, we can get it to work, I’ll follow him to college but I’ll stay totally out of the way…” (164-165) Like Milkman in Morrison's Song of Solomon ...from March 1990 “Sam seems like a really happy baby. I don’t know why I’m so sad.” (172) “I’m just feeling stressed to the nu-nu’s today, very tired and unable to keep the house and our life together. It is clear to me that we need a breadwinner. Also, servants.” (177) Bread winner always a masculine husband figure. What of her career? Why is putting more energy into more writing gigs (many of which she could do from home) so incompatible with her role as a mother? There are well documented and well known challenges to being a working mom but doing journalistic work is rather flexible. Is there no way she could navigate this terrain? “It would be one thing if I could leap into a disastrous romance and it would be just me who would suffer, but I can’t afford to get lost because Sam doesn’t have anyone else to fall back on. And I don’t have anyone else to fall back on, come to think of it.” (184-185) ...from April 1990 “I feel like I’m breaking my motherly balls trying to keep him safe. Sometime he’s the Dalai Lama, and sometimes he’s like a cross between a bad boyfriend and a high-strung puppy. And it never matters what my needs are. He never says, ‘Hey, babe, you’ve been working too hard—why don’t you take a couple of hours off? I’ll just lie here and read.’” (194) ...from May 1990 “Lots of the other babies Sam’s age have been crawling for months. Their moms say, ‘Oh, Joshua was one of those babies who couldn’t wait to crawl,’ and their tone suggests that this is some positive reflection on his moral character.” (195) Suggestion of inadequacy in the child and mother, if certain markers or standards are not met in a timely manner Like theCNN article on the “unnatural mother” “Now I look at how clingy and selfish I am, and how much I cry since Pammy got sick, and I worry that it’s wrecking him, and he’ll end up killing people and burying them in his basement and getting his photograph taken with Rosalynn Carter, like all those whacked-out serial killers in the late seventies—John Gacy, Jim Jones, etc.” (196) Makes me think of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Pammy, the woman she considers her “partner” (though they are not and have never been romantic) and second parent to Sam finds a lump in her breast and receives a bad, frightening diagnosis (note in the back of the book says she died in late 1992) Anne looks to Sam for solace/relief from anxious thoughts about Pammy’s illness Pammy is both helped and deeply saddened around Sam; Anne also weeps when she nurses Sam after first finding out about Pammy’s cancer, fearing Pammy may not live long enough to see Sam grow up ...from June 1990 “He is so full of energy and muscle, teething, ranting, crazed, but he’s the best baby you could ever hope for. Still a baby though, which is to say, still periodically a pain in the neck. Donna was saying the other day that she knows this two-year-old who’s really very together and wonderful a lot of the time, really the world’s best two-year-old, but then she added, ‘Of course, that’s like saying Albert Speer was the nicest Nazi. He was still a Nazi.’” (216) “When Sam’s having a hard time and being a total baby about the whole thing, I feel so much frustration and rage and self-doubt and worry that it’s like a mini-breakdown.” (216) “Earlier today he pulled a TV dinner table down on himself when I was doing something in the kitchen…He looked up at me, not crying but tortured, like ‘You ignorant incompetent slut—you did this to me; you’re supposed to be watching me, but nooooooo…’” (223) The criticisms and imagined thoughts of the baby and the cat are very revealing of how Anne sees herself ...from July 1990 “His concentration is great, and he’s got this fabulous sly and flirty look that renders you helpless, turns you to total mush. But sometimes he’s also very willful. Other times he can’t stop whining and clinging to me like some horrible horny Pekingese. It’s hard. He’s teething and uncomfortable and needy and looks like the inside of my soul when I first found out that Pammy was sick.” (236) ...from August 1990 “There was this new woman there, about eighty years old, and I went up to her wheelchair to say hi and introduce her to Sam. The people at the home usually gape at Sam as if I’ve brought Jesus into the room with me. But this woman looked at him angrily and said, ‘Is that a dog?’ And I said, ‘No, it’s a baby.’ And she said meanly, ‘What kind of baby?’ I tried to be Mother Teresa and to se Jesus in the distressing guise of the poor and incontinent, but I secretly wanted to push her wheelchair over and then kick her in the head.” (245) All this sadness, depression, and concern about Pammy dying and then flips and ends on this: “I don’t know what to make of it all. But, as I was writing this just now, Sam went into the living room closet, played a little song on the guitar, and then, just this second, peered around from behind the closet door, babbling absolutely incoherently, grinning at me like some like crazy old Indian holy man.” (251) Polarity of experiences and emotions Baby as both a drain, leech, parasite (which she calls Pammy at one point as she weakens and becomes more dependent, like a baby, and starts the pull the "Cancer Card") and as salvation, God, joy (she compares Sam to Jesus all the time)